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Mental Management Workshop: ‘Mind Your Head’ AUT University, August 2018 I presented ‘Mind Your Head: Improving sports performance through self-knowledge’, a discourse anchored in the notion that all sporting disciplines should be individualized, standards-based and values-driven at the AUT-hosted Mental Management Seminar ‘Mind Your Head’. Other presenters were: • Madonna Harris, Summer and Winter Olympics […]

Ta te tamariki tana mahi wawahi tahā. It is the job of the children to smash the calabash Theatre director Raymond Hawthorne was brutal. I took every criticism to heart. I offered my resignation. He seemed confused and asked why. I said ‘because you don’t like my work. I don’t want to let you down.’ […]

Hurihia to aroaro ki te ra tukuna to atarangi kia taka ki muri i a koe. Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you. Throughout my time at AUT I have been encouraged to share my experience in classroom practice and my ideas for developing a contemporary pedagogy supporting difference in […]

I’m a woman. That means I break hard. And mend like a motherfucker; all sexy and full of heartbreakingly beautiful scars. Staceyann Chin Since 2006 I have been given many opportunities to share my journey as a transgender woman in ways that have influenced colleagues in their classroom practice particularly with students whose gender-identity, expression, […]

‘This stardust won’t settle, because none of us should settle.’ Jacinda Ardern ‘Leadership Principles & Practice’ was conceived by Professor Mark Orams, as an archetype following Jungian behavioural configurations, a collectively-inherited, unconscious, universally-present idea of how things should be, have been, and must always be. Recurring descriptive phrases include ‘patterns’, ‘standard examples’, ‘similar repeating traits’ […]

I’m working class. Dad’s WWII experiences made him a pacifist yet I joined the army where I spent the Vietnam War. Dad getting smashed in the waterfront strikes made me an activist. Mum was an orphan raised by nuns. I’m transgender, married to my same-sex partner, thirty years age difference, parents to Finn, a double […]

Ka tangi te tītī Ka tangi te kākā Ka tangi hoki ahau (As the sooty shearwater announces its presence, As the parrot voices its presence, So too do I) Nga mihi nui ki a koutou katoa Ko Maungakiekie te māunga Ko te Moananui a Kiwa te moana Ko Ngāti Pākehā tōku iwi Ko takatāpui tōku […]

Rāhui Day (I need to check, I’ve lost count. Checked it’s Day 38 (41): a few good days, and a few crappy ones. It feels already like today will be one of the latter and the black dog is definitely sniffing at the door, it may already be in the room. As quite often happens […]

Rāhui Day 30 (32): spent much of the day trying to find something to commemorate in lives sacrificed to the gods of money, nationalism, and ego. The ANZAC Days of my childhood were not the jingoistic memorialising of tidied up carnage that they are today, the knowing was still too raw and real. Some men […]

Rāhui Day 19 (21): a good day for a couple of staunch Bloody Mary’s. Drafted some stuff. Watched a couple of ‘Midsomer Murders’ and the news. Boris & Nurse Jenny. Nice. Gareth Morgan. Not nice. People are priceless not collateral. Turd!